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Saturday, March 28, 2015

The importance of the budget for the country's defence

The
Modi Government’s first real annual Budget is perhaps its most
important test after flunking the Delhi Assembly examination.

Businessmen
will be watching it to gauge the intentions and determination of the
Government to create a pro-business atmosphere in the country. But equally it will be eagerly watched by the armed forces community.

Acquisitions are important, but there
is equal need for reorganising the command and control of the armed
forces to emphasise integrated functioning

Requirements

This
is because it will provide the signal as to the extent to which the
Government is committed towards accelerating their delayed
modernisation.

The
three services have their big-ticket wish list – Rafale for the IAF,
seed money for the Army’s mountain corps, the helicopters, missiles and
submarines for the Navy.

But they also have equally urgent requirements for plugging gaps and consolidating existing holdings.

The
problem as the Rs 2,29,000 crore interim defence budget of July 2014
reveals is that – 39 per cent is spent on pay and allowances, 11 per
cent on maintaining existing holdings, another 9 per cent on
miscellaneous things like housing and transportation.

Only
Rs 94,588 crore (41 per cent) is available for new acquisitions. Even
this is misleading as the capital budget contains money that must be
paid out for past acquisitions, besides the needs of the DRDO and
ongoing constructions in Indian factories and yards such as the new INS
Viraat, for whom a sum of Rs 1,200 crore were appropriated.

The
two big projects, going head to head as it were, are the Air Force’s
Rafale multi-role fighter whose estimates are Rs 120,000 crore, and the
Army’s mountain corps which also requires a like amount, if you take
into account its ancillary requirement of a division worth of medical
and engineering troops.

These
are heady sums, and even if broken up into yearly installments, they
could distort defence acquisitions since they would leave little or no
money for other equally critical needs such as artillery guns for the
Army, the replacement of light utility helicopters, minesweepers for the
Navy, and so on.

The Government’s headaches will be compounded by the fact that the Army’s mountain corps has already been raised.

The
Army skimmed off personnel from its 300 plus battalions, which are
usually about 900 strong, and whose pay and allowances have already been
budgeted for.

Their
equipment came from the war wastage reserves (WWR). So while the WWR
now stands at alarmingly low levels, the Indian Army does have an
addition corps which has added an important element in the order of
battle in the country’s northern border.

In
the past five years, the ITBP which polices the border has been
reporting a sharp increase of Chinese patrolling and presence along 14
or so points on the LAC that defines the Sino-Indian border where
Chinese claims and ours overlap.

Tight budget: According to the latest figures only Rs 94,588 crore (41 per cent) is available for new defence acquisitions

Further,
the Chinese presence is not only more insistent, it is now often
leavened by locals who demand that the Indian side go back to their side
of the border.

Two
recent manifestations of changed behaviour were the Chinese encampment
in the Depsang Plains which stoked off a crisis in April-May 2013 and
the massing of troops in the Churmur area at the junction of Himachal
Pradesh and Ladakh during Xi Jinping’s official visit to India last
September.

Deterrence

Actually, the Army will increase its strength by nearly 90,000 in the coming years taking its strength up to 1.26 million.

This
is not a good sign since this will require a significant enhancement of
the Army’s budget in the coming years, with a comparative pressure on
the capital needs of the IAF and the Indian Navy, as well, indeed, on
the modernisation requirements of the Army itself.

Army
leaders see this as inescapable since the two principal threats to the
country come from over the land borders with Pakistan and China.

In
the past, the armed forces were told that they needed to maintain a
deterrence posture with Pakistan, which included the possibility of
launching a war into Pakistani territory.

In the case of China, the instructions were to plan a purely defensive battle along the mountain frontier.

Bureaucracy

With
the PLA modernisation and force accretions in Tibet, the Indian Army
cannot undertake its tasks in a purely defensive deployment.

Equally important is the fact that over the years, coordination between Pakistan and China has, if anything, been intensifying.

During
the 1965 and 1971 wars, the Chinese did not intervene on Pakistan’s
behalf. But they made some pretty scary threats to do so.

The issue confronting military planners now is: What if the next time around, China does indeed intervene?

The
Chinese are masters of timing and it is difficult to forget their 1975
operation to eject the South Vietnamese forces and occupy the Paracel
Islands during the closing phase of the war that unified Vietnam,
ironically with Chinese help.

The
problem is not that the armed forces demands are excessive, but the
challenge of meeting them in a manner which does not deflect India from
its goal of long-term economic growth, which at the present juncture
requires massive investments in infrastructure and manufacturing
industries.

The way to go is to sharply tighten the management of our armed forces, which means cutting waste and needless redundancies.

The
first step here is to enforce the concept of an integrated military
where acquisitions planning can be standardised and prioritised.

Priority: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley must make India's defence funding a priority in his Budget

Acquisitions
are important, but there is equal need for reorganising the command and
control of the armed forces to emphasise integrated functioning.

The
second is to create an expert civilian bureaucracy which can undertake
the task instead of the inexpert one at present which exercises power by
emphasising procedure over subject specialisation.

These
are tasks that cannot be left to the armed forces leadership or the
Ministry of Defence. It is something that Prime Minister Modi and his
colleagues in the Cabinet Committee on Security need to sort out
urgently.